Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

This week we unpack multisensory commerce, the economical ebb and flow of re-commerce, and reflect on Phillip’s keynote at the Motion Creative Strategy Summit. PLUS: Spooky Commerce is back. Phillip, Brian, and Sarah journey to a haunted 1980’s Bay Area Toys R Us.

The Duality of Recommerce Key takeaways:

• Tactile interactions produce profound experiences – something digital media cannot replicate. Phillip’s keynote presentation at the Motion Creative Strategy Summit highlighted the polymathic inspiration of tactile creativity.
• [00:09:30] “Things that you consider to be highly immersive aren't as immersive as you think they are. The sphere is very immersive, but it is not as tactile as Meow Wolf's Omega mart.” – Phillip
• [00:21:15 ] “I step into that Waymo and I get, you know, a technology rush. It feels like, finally. Oh, finally. It's here. All the things that we've all dreamed of. And I think it's because the imagination has already moved on.” – Brian
• [00:33:30 ] "Sylvia Brown herself came in, so this brought a lot of coverage to the story...they did this whole televised seance moment, and she discovered that the ghost's name is Johnny Johnson." – Sarah
• [00:34:15] "What a weird fate for him. You know? First of all, tragic death. Second of all, like, a toy store gets built over, like, this beautiful ranch where he was supposed to live this life, and then he gets to haunt toys." – Brian

Associated Links:

• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The Instacart Paradox can easily confuse brands and advertisers. Instacart is part marketplace, part last-mile delivery, part advertising space, and yet not fully any of these all at the same time. Kiri Masters joins the pod to explain Instacart and how brands can leverage Instacart as a marketing strategy.

Instacart for CMOs

• Kiri just wrote a new book called “Instacart for CMOs.”
• “There wasn’t as much written about Instacart as there was about other retail marketplaces and there’s a huge thirst for information from brands.” - Kiri Masters
• This book is a comprehensive guide on how to approach Instacart and how to understand it for your business.

Fulfillment and ROI

• “[Instacart] doesn’t quite fit the definition of a delivery app and it doesn't quite fit the definition of a marketplace.” - Kiri Masters
• Instacart isn’t a traditional two-party marketplace, but a four-sided marketplace—the retailer, the in-store shopper, the delivery gig-worker, and the brands that advertise via Instacart.
• Delivery is a complex issue for businesses in making them profitable. Kiri suggests that fulfillment as a service is a new business model and Amazon is way ahead. Other retailers need their own infrastructure, but are far behind.
• Instacart is better positioned for the long-term because grocers, for example, are in the grocery business—not the innovation, technology, logistics, and fulfillment business.
• 10 out of the 10 clients assessed for the book said that Instacart is their highest ROI on ad auctions.
• Repurchasing is 20-25 percent of shopping activity and Instacart helps drive this by setting up its UI to recommend previously ordered product to its customers again and again.

The Instacart Paradox and the Complexity of Ad Networks

• Instacart offers great ROI for an advertiser and the demand is there. However, there’s a lack of control over the availability, the content, and the pricing.
• For example, if a certain geography is out of a certain product because of a retailer’s inventory, a competitor could win those advertising bids.
• Ad investments are fractionalized across many platforms, so in order for brands to build their own infrastructure, a lot of work would have to be done to bring in-house skill and capabilities to the table.

Links

• Find Kiri’s new book Instacart for CMOs, written with Stefan Jordev.

If you have any comments or questions about this episode, you can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners!

Society and Audience Connection

• There’s a difference in connection with audiences—connection through logic (written) and connection through emotion (art).
• On emotional connection: “...when it connects with somebody, it deepens the experience of the things you’re trying to say through words.” - Phillip Jackson
• Lumi is a software company connecting packaging manufacturers to brands and creating lasting relationships between those brands and manufacturers.
• Not only has COVID-19 affected manufacturing, but there’s a generational gap between manufacturers and brands. Lumi is bridging that gap.
• “I feel like we’re going to be in this golden age of business as performance art, where people are doing things that don’t make sense, but they’re doing it on a large scale when it comes to marketing.” - Stephan Ango

Tools with Soul

• “How do you create, give your company a soul, give your thing that you’re doing a soul? That’s very hard. It’s like trying to define why your thing should exist...” - Stephan Ango on what his podcast, Well Made, is trying to define.
• Slash Packaging is a hobby project of Stephan’s—and has helped brands tell the stories around their packaging.
• Slash Packaging isn’t trying to be the source of innovation for packaging, but they do want to build a framework for understanding what the more sustainable options are in your industry.
• “I want people to learn how to think about other ways that tools can be used so that they could find creative uses of these tools to expand all of our understanding and imagination and our horizons.” - Phillip Jackson
• “This idea of default, the idea of sampling, the idea of ubiquity in the tools that we use has created other problems that weren’t easy to anticipate and I think harder to solve for, which leaves room for challengers.” - Phillip Jackson

Links

• Listen to Well Made.
• Check out Lumi’s status tracker for their factories.
• Check out Slash Packaging.

Have any comments or questions about this episode? Reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners!

Fair Trade, Fair Labor, and Sustainable Chocolate is Possible

• Shipping chocolate is challenging enough, but sourcing and housing craft chocolate from global suppliers, and creating a marketplace for consumers who have very specific expectations around buying and consuming chocolate is harder still.
• The challenges of creating a great customer experience with shipping delays in the midst of COVID created issues in the logistics industry, and those had massive impacts on the quality of the product at the time of delivery. Some chocolate only arrived a month post-purchase, at which point it wasn’t consumable. This represents a problem in a luxury chocolate perishable category, when you’re at mercy of carriers and covid-related delays.
• “I don't think the mission makes us grow slower, but I think my focus and laser focus on becoming a profitable company, you know, kind of meters our growth. And because we're not funded, because it's like something that has been bootstrapped, we don't have the luxury of throwing thousands of dollars into ads or marketing and having that long cycle of seeing a return on our investment with customer acquisition.” —Pashmina
• The connection formed to chocolate as a kid reflects the outcome adults make in wanting to take the leap towards craft chocolate.
• “You have recipes and a whole ecosystem built around chocolate and the brands with those...so you're not just unseating a single experience, you're unseating experiences across multiple food ecosystems, which is another challenge and also an opportunity.” -Brian
• Bar and Cocoa are MBE-certified as a minority-owned business, and supports minority and BIPOC growers and founders. Their focus on doubling their Made at Origin chocolates have allowed them to support more people who are growing cacao at the source. As Pashmina says, “rather than just for these countries importing beans, the chocolate is staying there and being sourced locally, made locally by local manufacturers, whether they own the farms, whether they're working directly with the farms there.”

Associated Links:

• Check out Bar & Cocoa here: https://barandcocoa.com/
• Get our latest report here: Service is the New Storefront

The Post-Purchase Experience

• Consumer expectations are almost unfair for smaller businesses. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t continue to provide a great post-purchase experience.
• Many brands have turned to 3PLs to help meet the demand of fast shipping and to keep shipping costs lower.
• “Brands have to be more transparent with customers. They need to give customers a choice around what services they offer and the price. A lot of brands are starting to use 3PLs to meet the customer demand, which means they're storing inventory somewhere else throughout the country to get shorter deliveries. Brands need to communicate with shoppers after the purchase in a way that conveys the brand message differently than just an email saying your order has been shipped.” - Matt Crawford
• It’s more than just shipping, it’s about creating a memorable post-purchase experience. It’s about connecting the “front office” with the “back of house.”
• “I think of the post purchase because I try to make it a marketer's problem, not a person in the warehouse problem.” - Matt
• “When you improve shipping and you offer different options around shipping, it's almost like having additional products on your site.” - Brian

Associated Links:

• Get connected with Shippo!
• Listen to our other Step by Step seasons
• Find our Future Commerce episodes here: https://futurecommerce.fm/future-commerce-podcast

Have any questions or comments about the show? Contact us at Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.